When you try to see as many galleries as possible in one day everything starts to meld together. It’s difficult to recall everything you saw, where you saw it and what happened while you were there. Luckily we keep notes and, like Thompson on a bad day, we can retrospectively piece together what happened from the surviving fragments.
We put our heads in at Watters Gallery but the show there was almost over so we headed up the hill to Liverpool Street Gallery and the exhibition of Enrique Martinez Celaya. Try as we might, we haven’t liked many of the shows we have seen this year at the gallery, and those we did like was more a qualified enthusiasm than outright excitement. Entering the gallery (which as Peter Hill once so aptly described as ‘light filled’) we saw a very large painting of a yellow canary called The Eleventh of January and we felt good. This is a good bird picture, as bird pictures go, and so we were in a good mood straight away. There was another big picture of two people having sex called El que llega (The One Who Arrives) and many small pictures which made us think that Bad Painting was making a triumphant return. Sadly, the good vibes wore off very quickly as we became depressed by the gauzy colours, dark underpainting and lackluster watercolours.
Across the road on Liverpool Street is Beatty Gallery, one of the most defiantly eccentric galleries in Sydney. Run by Catherine Beatty who is as nice to visitors as she can be, the space is basically the downstairs rooms of her terrace house and the effect is one of disarming friendliness. The real pity is that the gallery artists are usually pretty awful or so young and inexperienced its all much the same. Paul Mallam is a photographer with a show called Fishion: Photographs of The New Aqua Culture which features a lot of shots of people in furs with sea food draped on them (example titles: Amy wears head-dress of garfish, octopus and blue swimmer crab or Rene in rabbit fur and octopus crown and Khai looks to party in studded white bait collar). The works aren’t too bad at all, but as fashion shots (or fashion parodies) they are so tame as to be absolutely negligible in their effect – think of how far out fashion has gone with David LaChapelle and you quickly these works don’t even begin to get where they could go.
King Street Gallery on Burton, we have noted in the past, has the most geographically confusing name of any gallery in town. Where are we, who are we and why are we here? We’re here to see The $440 Postcard Show where you can buy artworks by gallery’s artists for $440. Depending on how much you like the work of Andrew Christofides, Wendy Sharpe, Jenny Sages or Robert Hirschmann, this may be a bargain, with or without GST. Sadly, we don’t have that kind of money.
At Gallery Wren we were shocked. Shocked and appalled. The first shock was the sign on the new space which features a wren, so being bird fans we heartily approved, and then we were shocked again by the rows of gallery invitations, room sheets and other detritus you find at galleries, all kept in place by little plastic ponies. After that revelation we were half expecting to see Vicki and Melody out the back having a tea party complete with teddy bears, golliwogs and a cat in a pram, but this was when we were suddenly appalled.
Reading the room notes for Sarah Newall and Paul Donald’s show we noticed that the essay had been written by our old nemesis PCD 2004. (Actually, when we knew him he was PCD 1983 or just plain Paul Dooley (a.k.a. The Silver Fox) and nothing makes you feel older than that). PCD 2004 is a persuasive theorist so we don’t need to say a whole lot about the show except this is kind of like part two of Donald’s Gitte Weise show. Newall’s contribution is an exquisitely knitted vase of flowers in the centre of the room that hangs sadly from its plinth. It’s supremely tactile and you immediately want to touch it and hoist up the flowers so they stand upright. Surrounding the flowers are Donald’s drawing that take the anthropomorphised shapes from his Gitte Weise shows and has them in various moments of disturbing frankness – fucking, vomiting, falling apart.
Vicki Papageorgopoulos (a.k.a Vicki Wren) has her show Shipwrecked installed there – a single piece that’s like sinking to the bottom of the ocean. The room is draped in blue plastic, with lengths of clear plastic, crumpled up wads of foil on the floor and in the centre of the room, some cardboard boxes arranged so they take on the form of a submarine complete with propeller. This work put us in mind of Rodney Glick and his show at the MCA earlier this year which we had criticised it for being so slack – in that show the artist draped a blue tarpaulin over a ping pong table and called it the sea. Papageorgopoulos is working in similar vein with the viewer asked to ponder the nature of analogous materials and the way seemingly abstract gestures, materials and objects have a connotative meaning. Papageorgopoulos’s playfulness is a lot messier than Glick’s and maybe needs to be tidied up a bit to give the work more impact, or perhaps it’s just fine the way it is, we’re not sure.
Papageorgopoulos’s work, along with Newall and Donald’s, is part of what we’ve decided to call The New Realism. It’s what everyone is doing these days who isn’t painting or making videos – they’re making a version of objects and environments that exist only as analogous representations that serve as both a commentary on those objects and environments while simultaneously acting as codified representations of the artist’s subjectivity. Maybe we should call it Neo New Realism? Neu Realism?
Disc Gallery on Oxford Street was closed for lunch (which is pretty amazing considering it’s a CD shop) and we were relieved so we didn’t have to go in there and give them another bad review. The owners are so super enthusiastic we feel like absolute shits when we lie and say it’s very nice and then walk away thinking how bad it was. Phew. Global Gallery around the corner was open but when we saw the art from the street we decided not to go in and wait for next week’s Christmas group show.
Glenmore Road is a street of emotional extremes, moving from sorrow and shame to joy and excitement. Sadly, the latter emotions have nothing to do with the art and everything to do with the beer at the Royal Hotel at Five Ways. As we shall see…
Australian Galleries Works on Paper Gallery (Sydney) has a show of etchings by Deborah Williams called Yesterday I Was A Dog, Today I’m A Dog, Tomorrow I’ll Probably Still Be A Dog and that pretty much sums it up. The works are very dog like, emitting a palpable dogginess into the atmosphere, and we could tell by the way people in the gallery were sniffing each other’s arses it was having the same effect on everyone else too. Woof!
Literally next door is Harris Courtin Gallery. We had some sort of black out. We remember going in and a friendly man saying “you can look at the catalogue if you like”. The next thing we can recall is walking out as the same man looked sad and dejected. Perhaps with expensive therapy we can recall the events of our blackout, or maybe not. Whatever.
Sadly, we recall everything that happened at Barry Stern Gallery. Apparently Barry Stern Gallery is to Barry Stern as McDonalds is to the whole McDonald family – it’s just a brand now that’s run with ruthless efficiency by a faceless conglomerate, except in this case the faces are Dominic Maunsell and Ted Wickes, also known by their M-W Gallery in Woollahra.
The artist on show at BSG is a woman whose name we have forgotten but we can tell you that she loves giraffes (who doesn’t?) and there’s even a photo of her with a giraffe stuck to the wall. The artist has made bronze statues of giraffes and they have many giraffe-like qualities such as a long neck, a rectangular head, little horns and spots. Obviously, they’re not to scale, as giraffes can be quite big, but the advantage of scale model wildlife is that you can put them in your house, on your desk or similar. As we were leaving, Mr. Maunsell asked us what we thought of the show and when we said politely that it wasn’t our cup of tea, he looked very cross, like he was going to invade Poland.
Margarita Georgiadis has given up painting for digital photography but is hedging her bets by calling her show at Maree Mizon Gallery Digital Eyes. Glossy, huge and printed on metal, the works are superficially attractive but don’t stand up to close scrutiny or sustained viewing. It’s not that Georgiadis doesn’t have the skills – we have thought over the last few years that she’s almost there – she knows colour, she can handle paint, she’s got a good sense of scale – but the subject matter of her works are always desperately try-hard. Can anyone seriously consider a work that uses Mickey Mouse, necropolis statuary or a woman in a fetish cat’s eye mask? Well, we can’t, and having a washed up celebrity like Libby Gore opening your show doesn’t exactly add any credibility to what you’re doing. We’ve rapidly coming to the conclusion that maybe Georgiadis has gone as far as she’ll go. The really dispiriting part of this whole show is that the best work, Third Eye, was unsold when we visited.
Sherman Galleries Festivus 04 – On Of – Unique-state photographic works is a show of gallery artists and friends exhibiting one-off photographic works. Even artists not generally known for photographic works like Imants Tillers, Marion Borgelt and Dani Marti join artists like Lynn Roberts-Goodwin, Shaun Gladwell with experiments in the upstart form. It’s an Ok show – glossy, nicely mounted, professionally lit – just the sort of thing we have come to expect from Sherman Galleries.
A couple of weeks back we were discussing the name Festivus and how it came from an episode of Seinfeld. In the episode, George’s father invented an alternative Xmas celebration with a bunch of made-up traditions such as “The Annual Airing of Grievances”. In the spirit of that joke, we suggested that maybe Gene Sherman might sit down with Bill Wright and ask him to explain why he’s been doing such a shit job. Talk about throwing a hand grenade! People have been asking us what inside goss we had on the whole Wright-Sherman relationship when in truth there was none – it was just a joke. Clearly, we meant to imply no such situation, real or imagined, and apologise to all concerned. Anyway, maybe it’s Bill who needs to sit down with Gene and say, hey, this whole operation is ticking over very nicely, maybe we should take a few risks and get some artists in here who are going to cause some trouble! What have we got to lose? We must dare to dream!
At Gitte Weise Gallery it’s business as usual, which is to say, the main show is really poor and the show downstairs in the hire space is so much better, by a factor of ten. The room sheet explains Christopher Snee’s exhibition entitled changing place/changing pace:
“This ongoing project by Christopher Snee involves a close identification with the subject of travel and the long-term engagement in painting as a vehicle for constant modification and interpretation of ideas. This exhibition […] proposes changing spaces the artist encountered while living and working in Berlin.”
You have an engagement with something, not in it, especially not when it is also a “vehicle” that constantly modifies an “interpretation of ideas”. We began to suspect that the explanation of this show was written by one of the Rainbow Lorikeets that hangs around Sutherland Street, drunk on sweet, sweet nectar. It makes as much sense, especially when you consider the fact the show is an arrangement of oil on HDF board with some text printed on the wall. Who’s a pretty boy?!!!
Like all the other exhibitions at Room 35, Paul White does not have the luxury of some online images to go with his show, but we can tell you that like the Paul Donald show, this was a beauty. We were immediately charmed by the hand stitching on felt image of an airliner crashing into the ocean in Disaster Series and then bowled over by the sewn felt works downstairs. The pencil on paper works of theatres in Los Angeles and various streetscapes, cars and Vegas neon were outstanding, and who would have ever thought crafty stuff like this would steal the show?
Our legs and minds were starting to give way by the time we arrived at Australian Galleries and Rodney Pople’s exhibition So Pretty. He’s done a whole lot of paintings of pooches – yappy dogs, poodles, some mutts and a few bulldogs. We never thought we’d see the day when we would believe a dog could sail a boat, or punt a barge or dance the can can, but according to Pople’s paintings they can. The whole show is painted in curdled oils that look like cream left out in the sun and the mad curlicues and overripe lines reminded us of dim dark memories of British illustrator Ronald Searle. This is show is so horrible you’ve simply got to respect it – Pople is a man alone on an island of his own imagination and he and the dogs are its only citizens. Who in their right mind would pay $13,200 for a dancing poodle with vampire teeth with the title Miss America Must Resign?
Sanity returned at Kaliman Gallery and their final show of the year, a double header by Tommy Carroll and Mabel Juli. Carroll works at the Warmun Art Centre at Turkey Creek in Western Australia and has a style that feels familiar – large areas of natural ochres and pigments outlined by white dots. As abstract shapes and colour combinations of browns and blacks, they are outstanding works, eye popping, strong and without the slightest hesitation, but it’s Juli’s work, an artist from the same region, that are really startling. The artist uses isolated shapes floating on solid grounds. Although the familiar white lines are there, the images look like ideograms rather than map outlines. Juli’s canvases are minimal and the backgrounds are solid chunks of colour so chumpy you could carve ‘em! The best part about the paintings is that they say it all, you can just let your eyes swim in the mix, there is no need for words.
